


one hundred nineteen

by kormantic



Series: the ideas of Dublin [3]
Category: Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception Fusion, Gen, Undercover, Yuletide, career opportunities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:33:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28087017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kormantic/pseuds/kormantic
Summary: Mackey was still undercover when they gave me the nod. Spirited me right out of the wholesome ranks of eager young Garda halfway through second year, polished me off with a thorough bollixing of my already dubious character, and set me swimming with Cueball Lannigan and his sharks near every moment since.
Series: the ideas of Dublin [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2130270
Comments: 12
Kudos: 6
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	one hundred nineteen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ashling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/gifts).



I’m ducked under a shop awning, manky tracksuit freshened up with a spritz of Lynx, rain-sogged fags turning to peat in my sagging pocket. I’ve been keeping an eye on Antoinette now and again, but this is just a chancer and I can see her partner through the plate glass of the corner store, buying sweeties. He dodges out to wrench his car door open and huddle in out of the rain before pulling away. I reckon Moran wasn’t so much a fool as a cute hoor for clapping on to her. Mackey told me he’d been locked in a file drawer at Cold Cases till his own Holly let young Stephen in on a wee secret, and then Stephen Moran was on to Antoinette for a step stone, boosting himself right to the big lad’s table.

I don’t get a nasty tingle about him, but I still keep track of him. I’m reserving judgment like, but I’m sulky about it just the same. Whatever happened to Antoinette and her partner, they didn’t deserve it, sure. I don’t think she blames him, and if her career and his are now in tatters, I wonder if it’s a spreading plague, a mole in the Castle even, or just ill-starred politics.

Mackey’s left me three voicemails on my code-locked burner.  _ Three _ feckin’ voicemails. He’s not even my handler now, just took early retirement. I guess the dementia you hear of, brought on by the tedium of civilian life, set in early. Else he’s cashed me for a bribe or two. Just douse me in glow paint and turn out the lights, Frankie boy. The ones I run with can hit a target like that in the dark.

I finally buzzed him and let on that I’d meet him back by the harp, as on our first day. But I take my own time to do it, so. When I do stroll into the Trinity library, Mackey is waiting at a table for me, dressed as for a funeral in a suit, looking prim as your maiden auntie. And he’s not alone. Our Antionette is with him, and her little pet, too. Guess he drove just far enough to park on the other side of the building.

*

Mackey was still undercover when they gave me the nod. Spirited me right out of the wholesome ranks of eager young Garda halfway through second year, polished me off with a thorough bollixing of my already dubious character, and set me swimming with Cueball Lannigan and his sharks near every moment since. Even on this yoke there’s a lot of downtime, if not exactly free; more still if you sleep so little as I do. I roam the internet on my phone, restless, aimless, storing up useless facts and tittering at conspiracy theories and pictures of cats. Makes me the craic for pub trivia.

But I keep it vapid and random as much as I can: you only want bright, empty eyes in most shy corners. Knowing a pack of facts about armadillos is no danger as long as I also know my place and never seem truly one speck smarter than the jack o’ lanterns I associate with--not the cheerful modern orange ones you’re thinking of, sure, but the auld turnip heads, with teeth so human it makes your skin creep, the ones that look like a mummy peering up at you from the bog, bloated and full sore at being dead.

Those first months under, I had yet to meet Mackey, but I’d heard of him, course I’d heard of him. I’m coming up on his limit now - on his record, I should say. With all the action in Dublin, you’re bound to wash up on one shore or another. Most don’t stay under nearly so long.

After he rolled up shop, with the Snake on his way to prison like a good little gangster, they gave Mackey his choice of set ups and he took over running my op.

“Well, if it isn’t mini-me,” he’d said when he’d first caught sight of me standing by the Brian Boru, shifty and loitering as an accredited skanger should. We were safer talking in the Trinity Library than we’d have been anywhere in Dublin short of a submarine. “Let’s have a look at ya.”

He did in fact stroll around me like I was a mannequin in a wedding dress, stroking his chin and peering at me bright and hard.

“Everyone tells me you’re my heir apparent,” he said, taking my elbow like a fond uncle and conducting me out of the hall to a table and two straightbacked chairs. “What do you say to that?”

“I say a crown is a bit eye-catching for a nixer like this.”

“A funny boy, then. Are you after using that wit on everyone, or is it only on for special occasions?”

Antoinette’s called me Fleas since training college (“Ah, you know you’re an itchy little nibbler, then, don’t moon about it.”). Now it is that they call me Taz you see, short for tasmanian devil, because when you’re a little fella in a house full of meathooks, you go touchy and spare now and again so they don’t sidle up too close or get bored and think you’re overdue a boot to the face. And to do that you need to be random, like. Unpredictable. A rabid little cyclone can keep them on their toes. I’ve bitten a few, I’m not above it, and sometimes I let the whiskey flow and get a red-eyed cackle on that would make your hair stand up. Keeps the distance at least.

The flip side of being mental is that no one minds about chatting any fool thing in your earshot, because they think you’re half-mad and apparently don’t ever equate a steel trap for trivia bits a worry for overhearing about any deals going down. It is a puzzle to me, but then they go home to kiss their wedded wives most nights, have a pack of chiselers they’ll cheer on at footie, even though they’ll keep two hens on the side and stick a blade in your eye if they think you’ll cross them. If that’s not contrary then I’m well out.

I flash a little of that, then - roll my shoulders in, hunch down, pat at my pockets. Now I’m just your waterlogged stray, shivering in the comedown and savage for a fix. Antoinette once told me I vibrate at a high frequency, and that I have black eyes, like a haunted doll’s, when I go ‘full-skang’, as she calls it. “Bum a fag, then? I'm skint.”

Mackey gave me a slow nod, then, but not to offer me a cig. “Okay, I can see it. You’re all undersea documentary, like - here we have the little octopus, blending in with his surroundings, pink and shaped like a bit of coral, and then bang!, you snap up a fish twice the size of ya.”

I bunched my eyebrows at him. “Yes, Mr. Mackey, sir. I’m small of stature. I won’t need you to remind me.”

He snorted and shook his head.

“Ah, too much Attenborough with the babby. I’m domesticated these days, even a little dry now I’m out of the water, myself. But you, lad, you have gills, sure.”

*

Loggerhead sea turtles can huff it for ten hours a stretch, but turtles now they’re cold blooded though, aren’t they? And the little freshwater yokes can spend all winter long at the bottom of a frozen lake, not using their lungs at all. Hand to God they breathe out of their arse, sincerely, you can look it up, or ask Alex Trebek yer own self.

Some seals though, they can hold a breath for near two hours at a go. Human divers, we fill our lungs with air, such as it is, and then... hold our breath. Seals, now, they snort it all out before they go under, sounds like someone punching a lake-top. So undercover, see, is a lesson in never ever taking an indrawn breath where any folk can eyeball you as you do.

Smoking helps somehow. Always good to have something to fiddle with your hands. And smokers don’t like deep breaths overall anyway, ya see.

So not a turtle or a fish, a seal then, or maybe just part selkie. Always hiding my skin, and on edge that I won’t be able to find it again when I do want it back. If I do.

I've been holding my breath down here for an age now, and I'm getting near to where it's surface or up and drown. Antoinette isn't for undercover, and I don't have any other friends from my year at Templemore. My mam died before I even started with Cueball and his lads, a fact Mackey thought of as just a lucky bonus for the job. Anyone from the block would sooner shake hands with Maggie Thatcher herself than lift a glass with a copper. And where does that leave me, should I ever put the crims I run with each and all away?

*

Antoinette lets Mackey do the talking, from the first rumble (“I’ve a proposition fer a fellow such as yourself.”) to my own patent incredulity.

I stare at Antoinette full gawp and ask, “You’re telling me your man over there, that simple-faced ginger, is after bein’ a  _ spy _ ?”

Moran flushes a dull red, hisses, “Keep your voice down, man,” and Antoinette laughs so hard her eyes get wet.

“Ah, it is priceless, isn’t it,” she murmurs, dabbing at her mascara with the heel of her hand. “But it’s all true. Every wonderland note of it.”

“What’s for you after undercover?,” scoffs Mackey. “A badge? A gun? Not your style, Oisin, lad, and well you know it.”

I haven’t heard my given name since my mam passed, and it’s like the cherry of a fag pressed against my cheek. I flinch.

Antoinette, though, she leans forward, near to touching me.

“James Bond is first of all make-believe and a poxy cunt besides. He’d have been utter shite at undercover, rule one being not going here and there introducing yourself under your actual birth cert  _ given name _.” She shoots Mackey a glare, and he looks sniffy as a cat for having stepped wrong. Now she does rest two fingers on the back of my hand. “We need another forger and there’s no one for it but you. You’d be only gorgeous at the work, and Mackey knows best of us that you’re pure class. It would injure his dignity to beg,” and she grins then, because she can tell she has me, “But he might if you stay coy about it.” 

The air is sweet with the hum of new possibility, wet tobacco and a tang of electricity latticed with old leather and foxed pages, the taste of it all held in a moment like a single plucked note from a brass-pinned harp string.

I take a breath.

END

**Author's Note:**

> Ashling, never have I seen a fic request so meticulous and all-encompassing. I was spoiled for choice and you gave me so much build with! I hope this story fits in with some of your hopes for the Dublin Murder Squad.


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